2014 was another stellar year for music and I have the iTunes bill to prove it. I didn’t buy many complete albums, but below are the tracks, artists, and videos that I had on repeat over the past 12 months:

Scandinavia continues to produce some of the most interesting and exciting pop music around. Lykke Li made a sweeping vista of heartbreak in “No Rest for the Wicked”. Perennial favorite Robyn and producer duo Röyksopp made a pulsing club track urging us to “Do It Again“. Makthaverskan made an accusation a thing of soaring beauty in “Asleep“. I don’t know if it’s the cold weather or the socialized medicine that’s creating such a vibrant music scene just below the Arctic Circle, but more of this, please.

Few artists captivated me this year like fka Twigs. She fuses electronic music and R&B into a sound that is equal parts sexy, dangerous, and arresting. “Two Weeks” is this year’s definitive make-out song and I won’t be surprised if it fuels a slight spike in the birth rate in 2015. The video for “Two Weeks” is also pretty great and should be familiar to anyone who remembers the movie Queen of the Damned.

A year ago, almost nobody had heard of Future Islands. And then they appeared on Letterman’s show to perform “Seasons”, a moment that quickly went viral. The song itself is bittersweet and full of yearning, qualities that lead singer Sam Herring captures even while showing off some of the goofiest dance moves ever captured on video. Amidst a wash of New Wave synths, Herring beats his chest as he demands a human connection, something that we can all understand.

I can’t stop watching the video for Nicki Minaj’s “Anaconda”. And not just for the obvious reasons. She is one of the most fluid rappers working today, aided by a wicked sense of humor and a subversive agenda that has plenty to say about sexuality, feminism, and being a woman in a male-dominated and frequently misogynistic business. Sure, Minaj is drop-dead gorgeous, but that wouldn’t matter much to me if she wasn’t also immensely talented.

I’ll close with a personal anecdote. I attended my first Rock the Garden festival over the summer and I had the opportunity to meet local sensation Dessa backstage. I’ve long admired her carefully crafted songs and I was thrilled to watch her perform live. She was charming, kind, and generally awesome. Thanks, Dessa!

It’s once again time for me to share my unsolicited opinions on the pop culture that brought a smile to my face over the past year. I’ll start with television, which is fast becoming my preferred medium for complex storytelling.

The sheer quantity of TV worth watching this year left me and my TiVo feeling a little overwhelmed. Personal favorites like Game of Thrones and The Americans continued to be compelling (that GoT episode depicting a particularly cinematic battle on the Wall is better than anything Peter Jackson has done with the entirety of the ill-conceived Hobbit trilogy) while Fargo completely surprised me with a series that outshines the original Coen brothers’ movie in terms of character and plot.

In any other year, True Detective would have been my favorite show of the year. It generously borrows from the literary traditions of noir and Southern Gothic, but the combined talents of Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey give heft to the pulpy material. The show establishes a foreboding sense of dread that never lifts (despite the rather pat ending). I’m rewatching the series now and I’m still struck by the quality of the writing and the assured direction.

But this was also the year of The Knick, a show that revitalized the medical drama by sending it into the past. And I loved every blood-soaked minute of it. This show has it all: an impressively mustachioed Clive Owen playing an arrogant surgeon with a cocaine habit, Andre Holland as an African-American surgeon who can barely tolerate the casual and vicious racism surrounding him, gory surgical procedures, shocking violence, forbidden sex, nuanced supporting characters, and a Cliff Martinez electronic score that captures the chaotic dawn of the 20th century in New York City. It wasn’t like anything else on television, an impressive feat given the embarrassment of riches in 2014.

Horror films work best when they reflect the mundane through a looking glass darkly. The Babadook, a finely honed and nerve-wracking movie from Australian director, focuses its looking glass on a hallowed fixture of domestic life: the relationship between mother and child. We meet Amelia (Essie Davis), a young widow who is still grieving the death of her husband several years past. Her grief is made even more excruciating by the circumstances of his death, which I won’t detail here because it’s a crucial plot element. She does her best to care for Samuel (Noah Wiseman), her young and rather high-strung son, but a toxic combination of resentment and loss have placed her on the knife’s edge of a nervous breakdown.

One night, Samuel asks his mother to read to him from a mysterious storybook that he found on his shelf. The book depicts, through a series of pop-up images, a menacing character named Mr. Babadook. Babadook’s likes include top hats, hanging from the ceiling, and driving people to commit murder and suicide.

Amelia quickly decides that this is not appropriate reading material for a 7-year-old, but the damage is already done. Samuel soon begins hearing voices and, in one particularly harrowing scene, has a full-blown meltdown brought on by visions of the Babadook. And then Amelia begins seeing a cloaked figure creep into her bedroom at night. Before long, they are both trapped in their dimly lit home by their own fear and insomnia as the Babadook lurks in the shadows.

For a debut feature, The Babadook is remarkably self-assured. Kent doesn’t introduce any extraneous details or waste time establishing the story. She has created a sleek cinematic engine emitting a disquieting thrum that grows steadily louder. It’s one of the best movies of the year and I’m expecting great things to come from Ms. Kent. The movie is playing in only a handful of theaters, but is readily available on iTunes and Amazon.

MIT professor Andrea Louise Campbell writes an essay for Vox describing how Medicaid forces people with disabilities to live in poverty in order to receive health coverage. She focuses on California’s Medicaid system (Medi-Cal), which she was forced to examine after her sister-in-law became a quadriplegic in an automobile accident. Many of her criticisms of the program, such as the harshness of the income and asset limits, won’t come as a surprise to those familiar with Medicaid policy.

In fact, Campbell’s outrage strikes me as naïve for a professor who teaches social welfare policy and her critique carries a worrisome undertone of middle-class entitlement. Disability advocates have long made the argument that Medicaid eligibility criteria traps people with disabilities in poverty, but Campbell only acknowledges this in passing. At one point in her essay, Campbell describes how a relative bought formula for the couple’s newborn baby and she writes, “I wondered what people who don’t have middle-class relatives do in a situation like this.” It’s really not that difficult to imagine the deprivations that people with disabilities without middle-class family members must endure, but Campbell seems shocked that this kind of thing goes on in America.

I get that most Vox readers don’t give much thought to disability policy and the article is meant to illustrate how such policy affects real families. But if Vox plans on exploring this topic further, it might be a good idea to get insights from the actual people with disabilities who live with the consequences of these policies on a daily basis.

And yet, the actual policies seem to be working. More Americans have health coverage than ever before. Health care costs are slowing at a remarkable rate. And during the current open enrollment period, over 750,000 individuals have already selected an ACA health plan.

The law continues to offer real benefits for millions of people, but this fact gets lost in the political echo chamber. As for second-guessing Democrats like Schumer, I suggest they take a running leap into a very shallow lake. If Democrats had done a better job of actually explaining how the ACA helps people, the conservative misinformation campaign might have been less successful. They could have also fought harder for a public option plan or, even better, Medicare for all. Instead, they spent an interminable amount of time trying to win conservative support that never materialized.

The ACA is certainly a flawed piece of legislation, but it is ultimately making life better for Americans. Rumors of its demise remain greatly exaggerated.

Stephen Hawking wants to play a villain in a future Bond movie. Of course, you know what this means. This means that I’m kicking off my Official Campaign to Be Stephen Hawking’s Henchman in As-Yet Undetermined James Bond Movie. I would be perfect as the guy who sits behind Hawking and glares menacingly at a bound and gagged Bond while Hawking provides a detailed explanation of his plans to destroy the Earth in a re-creation of the Big Bang. I would be willing to work for scale and call Hawking “Boss” if the script calls for it. I could even provide comic relief after Bond inevitably escapes and a furious Hawking instructs his pet cybernetically-enhanced gorilla to dispatch me.

It’s unlikely that anyone will make a (pretty good) movie about my life, so this may be my best shot at getting my name in IMDB. Anybody know a good agent?

It appears that the only thing that could snap me out of my extended blogging absence is the first trailer for the next Star Wars movie. As I frequently note, trailers can be deceptive indicators of a movie’s true quality, but this brief preview does its best to hit all the classic Star Wars motifs. We see glimpses of a desert world (Tatooine, perhaps?) as well as a menacing Sith-like figure, X-wing fighters skimming the surface of a body of water, and a magnificent shot of the Millennium Falcon evading a squad of TIE fighters. The trailer does a nice job of sparking speculation about the rest of the movie. Does the Empire still exist? What are the Sith up to? Who are these young whippersnappers featured in the trailer?

Unfortunately, we’ll have to wait until next December (or perhaps the next trailer) for answers. In the meantime, here’s your fix:

Interstellar tries so hard to say something profound about humanity’s place in the universe and our ability to overcome our more self-destructive impulses, but some silly plotting and overwrought dialogue pull the movie into the gravity well of mediocrity. The movie is set on a future Earth that is slowly dying. Crops are failing around the world and dust storms regularly plague the countryside. Matthew McConaughey plays Cooper, an ex-pilot and farmer who discovers a gravitational anomaly that leads him to a secret NASA project to save humanity. nASA has discovered a wormhole to another galaxy and has already sent several manned missions to assess the region for human habitability. It now wants to send another mission to check on the scientists from the original mission and determine whether colonization is possible. Cooper is asked to join the mission. Because life is all about just showing up.

The movie does explore some truly interesting ideas regarding time dilation, black holes, and artificial intelligence. At times, I felt like I was watching an updated version of 2001 (a movie that I love). But then the story crumbles in the third act, taking the tone of a late-night, pot-fueled bullshit session between philosophy majors. I’m not sure why so many science fiction movies succumb to this kind of New Age faux profundity, but it completely takes me out of the story. My eyeballs are still sore from the rolling. The movie is worth seeing for the spectacle, but I’m still waiting for the true successor to Kubrick’s masterpiece.

My election predictions were mostly accurate, although I underestimated the strength of Republicans in both Minnesota and nationally. Four years of political stalemate, combined with stagnant wage growth, has left voters frustrated and angry. They directed that anger at the most obvious target: the President. I’m not sure Tuesday’s results point to a more conservative electorate, though. Republicans did so well because they didn’t have to define a specific agenda; attacking Democrats was all the strategy they needed to win. We’ll see whether voters remain as enamored with Republicans once they take control of Congress and start putting policy proposals in writing.

Even if Republicans wear out their welcome, Democrats are unlikely to take back Congress anytime soon. As long as Democratic voters are concentrated in urban areas, it will be a struggle to recapture the House. The Senate and the Presidency may swing between the parties in coming years, but it’s going to be a long while before Democrats have enough power to advance a truly progressive agenda.

It’s Election Day and Republicans are poised to take control of the Senate. As I’ve noted previously, Republican control of Congress won’t make our national politics any less dysfunctional. The GOP will need to win the Presidency and probably a few more Senate seats in 2016 before they can start enacting their agenda. In the meantime, we’ll have plenty of opportunities to watch gushing public displays of affection between Mitch McConnell and John Boehner while Obama does his best to tame that pulsating vein in his forehead at every press conference for the next two years.

Here are my predictions for the Senate and state races:

U.S. Senate: Republicans will secure a 53-seat majority with victories in Montana, South Dakota, Georgia, Arkansas, Alaska, Louisiana, Kansas, and Iowa. Democrats, through the strength of their ground operations, will eke out victories in North Carolina, New Hampshire, and Colorado. Here in Minnesota, Al Franken should easily win a second term against an opponent who didn’t attract much national attention and struggled to introduce himself to voters.

Minnesota Governor: This race has tightened in recent weeks, but Dayton should win by 5-7 points. Minnesota’s economy has been performing well and Republican Jeff Johnson hasn’t been able to make a compelling case for Dayton’s ouster.

Minnesota House of Representatives: This is a difficult call. Minnesotans don’t like to give either party extended control of government, but the DFL should benefit from Dayton and Franken appearing on the ballot. I’ll take a chance and predict that the DFL will retain a slim House majority, which could allow Minnesota to follow a progressive path for another two years despite the ongoing policy stalemate at the national level.